William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854, Volume 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

SYNOPSIS:

Rather than viewing the South as a monolith, Freehling emphasizes the South's diverse and at times contradictory nature by focusing on sub-regional differentiation. He believes the Lower South was ultimately radicalized because of its distrust of the Upper South's position on the expansion of slavery. Freehling attempts to show "that two antithetical abstract systems, democracy and despotism, when forced to rub against each other in close Southern quarters, intriguingly intermeshed to shape not just politics but a world." (ix) He sees Texas's annexation as the "largest turning point on the road to disunion." (353) The issue consumed the Southern election of 1844, focusing attention for the first time on "which party's measures, not men, were most loyal to slavery." (561) The result was a "Southern Whig drubbing" from which the party never recovered, revealing a "profoundly endangered republic." (562) Freehling believes annexation was a pivotal victory for the "Slavepower." Not even the Kansas-Nebraska Act "made southern frontiers safer." (564)

EXCERPT:

"The Border South produced over half of Dixie's industrial products. The lower South produced less than a fifth. In 1850 the Border South's Baltimore, St. Louis, and Louisville ranked first, third, and fourth in order of size among southern cities, with a combined population of almost 300,000. The lower South's three largest cities, New Orleans, Charleston, and Mobile, ranked second, fifth, and seventh in Dixie, with a combined population well short of 200,000. The three leading Border South cities, despite twice as many whites as Gulf counterparts, possessed only a fourth as many slaves. In cities and in the countryside, the Border South melted into a North-South twilight-zone, more like Chicago than Charleston, more akin to midwestern grain farms than to southwestern cotton plantations." (19)

"South Carolinians also disliked Virginia gentlemen's tone on slavery. Vague approval of ending bondage, assuming proper conditions, could be heard under proper circumstances in proper Virginia drawing rooms. Proper circumstances meant no 'outside agitators' present. Right conditions meant removal of free blacks. But Virginia squires occasionally speculated that their blacks might someday be diffused to Africa or drained to the south, with whites streaming to Virginia to take slaves' place. Lowcountry South Carolinians, in contrast, could not conceive that whites would stream toward malarial swamps." (31)

"If the southward sale of slaves continued--and in the 1850s the slave drain increased--the plantation South could shrivel over many decades into a handful of Deep South states. As the Upper South's slaves drained away, the region's inhabitants would be freer to suspect that slavery and democracy were alien, freer to feel a greater commitment to permanent Union than to permanent slavery, freer to side with Illinoisans rather than with South Carolinians. If half the South gradually became more than half-northern in commitment, an ever demographically blacker, ever geographically shrinking North American slave empire was bound to feel holed up, hemmed in, at the northern majority's mercy." (24)

RELATIONSHIP:

Freehling emphasizes what he calls a "slave drain" from the Upper South, especially from Virginia, to the Lower South, and he connects this demographic shift with a wider economic and political one--the loosening of the Upper South from its slavery moorings. The border region, Freehling asserts, was "a world between" with high numbers of free blacks, wide practice of slave hiring, and fewer enslaved people as a percentage of the population with each passing census year. (35) Freehling focuses on the development in the North of what he calls the Great Slavepower Conspiracy, the idea that whites feared the South because of its political power and domination, and extends the idea of the Slavepower into the border South, where, he argues, mountain residents resented the eastern, privileged elite. Although Freehling's study takes the events up to 1854, it considers Virginia as paralyzed in the early 1850s, attempting unsuccessfully to balance slavery and egalitarianism. (514) In Augusta County, however, the late 1850s witnessed dynamic growth hand-in-hand with persistent practice of slavery. Augusta residents wove slavery into nearly every economic aspect of their lives, and only a handful even considered attempting to disentangle it. No one in Augusta suggested that slavery was doomed in the long run or even that strategies for ending enslavement should be openly discussed. Even Joseph A. Waddell, whose diary revealed the Whig editor's privately held distaste for slave sales and his expectation of eventual end of slavery, never wrote publicly these sentiments, and stood with the slavery system in the sectional crisis despite his misgivings.

"Slavery was ubiquitous and systemic in Augusta County's economy and society. No town or place in Augusta was without slavery, no person distant from it. Slavery extended into every corner of the county, concentrating in no one area."

"Free blacks of Augusta County lived in tenuous circumstances surrounded by slavery, but they managed to find work, and some acquired significant property in the community."

"White people in Augusta rarely discussed slavery openly and for the most part only did so under provocation when they hoped to defend their institution."

"Franklin County's papers spent more ink--almost all of it negative--on its nearly two thousand free blacks than Augusta did on its five thousand enslaved people."

"In the first half of 1860 Republican editors in Franklin's Repository and Transcript attacked slavery as a violation of nature that stole from the workingman the fruits of his labor; they focused mainly on slavery's potential to undermine free labor."

"In the first half of 1860 Democratic editors in Franklin County emphasized slavery's compatibility with the Northern economy and society and Northern complicity in the South's institution."

"In the heat of the campaign of 1860 both Franklin Democrats and Republicans shifted their emphasis on slavery."

"Augusta's Whig Party emphasized that slavery was safer within the Union than without and that in the 1860 election slavery had become needlessly politicized. The Augusta Whigs moved to develop a new party around Constitutional Unionism."

"Augusta's Democratic Party emphasized that slavery was the country's economic engine of success, protected in the territories by the Dred Scott decision, and they defended Stephen Douglas to the end as the best candidate to defeat Lincoln."